Leveraging Paid Advertising to Accelerate Results and Grow a Sales Pipeline

An Unprecedented Challenge in the Industry

Corrosion engineering isn’t exactly seen as the most cutting-edge or innovative industry, typically. While there is an abundance of innovation surrounding the actual scientific research and technology used within the industry, there is an extreme lack of innovation within the industry when it comes to digital marketing strategies and practices.

As a customer-centric company, ECS wanted to break that mold and serve their customers in a way that no other company in the industry had done before.

They decided to add an eCommerce component to their business, allowing fire sprinkler contractors to shop online for the corrosion solutions and parts they need to better serve their customers, too. (You can read about how we implemented an eCommerce store for them here.)

Since this was unprecedented, ECS needed some help building awareness and demand for the eCommerce component of their business and ultimately needed to make this a revenue-driving and lucrative investment, in addition to continuously growing the revenue of the more traditional side of their business, too.

Building a Comprehensive Google Campaign

Our team knew that paid advertising was the right solution to implement to get accelerated results, build awareness, and ultimately drive the leads and revenue necessary for ECS.

With $2,000/month in advertising budget to start, our objectives were to:

1. Gain market share
2. Attract bottom of the funnel leads
3. Support sales through retargeting ads

To achieve these objectives, our team chose Google as the best platform to utilize based on the audience and identified the main categories for keywords, brainstormed related terms and phrases for these categories, and then used modified broad match and phrase match strategies based on the number of monthly specific key terms.

Keywords with 50 to 200 monthly searches were assigned modified broad matches, keywords with 200 to 1,000 monthly searches were assigned phrase matches, and keywords with 1,000+ monthly searches were assigned exact matches.

The next (and extremely important) step was to draft ad copy that mirrored the target audience’s buyer journey and the objectives we were trying to achieve. Different ads would serve different purposes at different stages of the buyer’s journey, ultimately leading to relevant conversion points.

To ensure we were serving our audiences with the most value possible through each ad, we utilized keyword insertion to dynamically update ad text to include keywords that matched their search terms and ensured we were utilizing keywords that helped users find solutions to their problems, like “bulk purchase”, “cost savings”, or “corrosion control”. We added bidding keywords to headlines and descriptions, and used calls-to-action to get users to take specific actions and convert.

Finally, we built variations of landing pages in HubSpot that closely aligned with the ads they were connected to so users would see the content they were expecting from the ad. We tested different verbiage, layouts, designs, imagery, and forms on these landing pages for optimal user experience and conversions.

We built a series of display ads, search ads, and video ads to ensure we were reaching our audience effectively.

Display Ad Examples

Search Ad Examples

Video Ad Example

After running ads and collecting preliminary results from our proof-of-concept campaign, we made some adjustments and increased ad budget to really throw fuel on the fire and accelerate results.

Optimizations and adjustments included:

1. Adjustment of the match types for the bidding keywords
2. Expansion of audience targeting through modified broad match
3. Refinement of audience targeting through phrase match and exact match
4. Adjustment of content and design of landing pages, including removing navigation menus to decrease bounce rates, adding more information to descriptions, and call-to-action adjustments
5. Adjustment of ad copy to make it more conversational and more related to user problems
6. Experimentation with auto-applied ad suggestions

By making these adjustments, especially with audience refinement, we were able to capture more sales qualified leads and make better use of the ad budget.

Bottom-Line Results from Advertising

Efforts from paid advertising on Google resulted in the following in 2019:

Monthly contacts generated increased from an average of 3 to 12 contacts for paid media as optimizations were made throughout the campaign. And, a huge corresponding upward trend in revenue followed:

Advertising efforts have contributed to bottom-line results for ECS, and have also contributed to a large percentage of our overall digital marketing campaign goals. Additionally, paid advertising has been able to provide additional audience insight for use in marketing campaigns and has filled ECS’ sales pipeline with a large amount of sales qualified leads that marketing can nurture and help the sales team close into customers, which has proven to continue to ROI in the longer term for both teams.

Most importantly, ECS’ investment in paid advertising had a definite ROI for them, with over $266,000 in closed or pending deal revenue generated from paid sources in 2019 when this campaign was running (22x over their overall advertising spend).

Paid advertising is a great complementary addition to any digital marketing campaign, and is a way to accelerate results more quickly while you implement other organic tactics for growth in the longer-term.

Our team would love to help you achieve the growth you’re looking for, just like our client ECS, and it just might start with paid advertising!